With the dramatic increase in the use of the Internet as the backbone for corporate and personal communications, there is a growing demand for data centers that serve as centralized locations for hosting servers and ancillary equipment. Modern technological advances have allowed such data centers to accommodate large numbers of servers in increasingly small areas. Thus, more and more servers may be fitted into a typical server rack, which requires managing server racks with high energy densities. One of the challenges that data center managers face is supplying sufficient power to each rack in order to prevent breaker overloads and downtimes. There have been many attempts to provide various power monitoring systems which allow a data center manager to determine when high loading levels occur.
Additionally, the physical environment occupied by equipment in a data center is critical for availability, security, and reliability. The physical environment may include such environmental factors as temperature, humidity, fire, water, and the like, which may influence the performance of data storage and processing equipment. There have been many attempts to provide environmental monitoring systems for measuring and monitoring environmental factors, as well as for alerting data center administrators to such environmental factors.
Thus, power distribution and monitoring, as well as environmental monitoring, for servers and other various equipment is critical for providing reliable and secure data centers. However, data center managers may have difficulty implementing individual monitoring systems and power distribution systems which have been developed by different vendors. Further, it may be difficult to provide an integrated software interface for the various power distribution and environmental monitoring systems.
Consequently, it would be desirable to provide an integrated monitoring system for monitoring various environmental factors, as well as performing power monitoring. It would also be advantageous if such a system supplied sufficient power to servers and ancillary equipment in order to prevent breaker overloads and downtimes, and issued alerts to potential problems. Further, it would be desirable to provide a stand alone integrated monitoring system which would not require the installation of client software.